Hong Kong's blueprint for protest

Why the seeds of resistance that have been planted in the minds of the youth since 2019 will be not very easy to supplant

Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle

By Ching Kwan Lee

Published by Harvard University Press

344 pages ₹4,571

 Forever Hong Kong is the most recent work by Ching Kwan Lee, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of three award-winning books on China. The book discusses the idea of decolonisation in the context of Hong Kong. Dr Ching points out that with regard to Hong Kong there are two contrasting views on the process. “On one hand, decolonization is an agenda of domination, in the name of anti-western imperialism, Chinese nationalism, and civilizational order, over subjects and territories controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. On the other hand, emerging from the Hong Kong experience, decolonization is a liberatory project for relational equality in the broadest sense: among citizens, classes, races, cultures, and nations,” she writes.

 The book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how Hong Kong’s law-abiding and law-fearing populace transformed from its firm belief in non-violence and passive protest and sit-ins to adopting violent and law-breaking protests. The author effectively captures this transition through in-depth interviews across class, age, and gender. These interviews also highlight the events and issues that caused a major shift in the thinking of the citizenry with respect to their future and their relationship with communist China as well as their colonial history. As she writes, “A shared sense of victimhood unified the citizenry, including parents who were previously pro-regime. Protest chants on the streets darkened from ‘Hong Kongers, Resist!’ to ‘Hong Kongers, Revenge!’ and soon ‘Hong Kong independence, the only way out!”

 The most widely reported and discussed 2019 protests were in response to the Extradition Bill proposed by then Chief Executive Carrie Lam, which concerned the extradition of fugitive offenders to the mainland. The author also provides a nuanced analysis of what Hong Kongers were debating during the 2019 protests. “The movement of 2019 was not just another protest; it was deemed a one-off, all-in, no-holds-barred last stand for the people and the city,” she writes. On the use of technology by protestors, she shows how the 2019 movement became a global symbol with Hong Kong playing a significant role in the Milk Tea Alliance, the informal pan-Asian opposition group to the Chinese Communist Party, with technology enabling the dissemination of ideas across national boundaries and within the diaspora.

 The book also highlights that “at the heart of colonial hegemony in Hong Kong were four presumably non-negotiable, taken-for-granted principles: Stability and prosperity, the rule of law, free-market utopia, and China as destiny.” Dr Ching discusses how since 1997, Hong Kongers also started acknowledging their distinct identity vis-à-vis China. This distinction has been strengthened by Beijing’s heavy-handedness and its constant rejection of every possible demand made by Hong Kongers. As the author sums up, “It was only when the anti-national education campaign proved to be the beginning rather than the end of China’s retreat from ‘One Country, Two Systems’ that the postcolonial generations came to realize the incompatibility between being Chinese and being Hong Kong.”

 Hong Kong as a global city has also been a victim of geopolitical headwinds. The fact that Beijing could use its leverage and position in the United Nations and managed to exempt Hong Kong from gaining self-rule after the end of British colonial rule, underscores the limited clout of a small city. Even today, Hong Kong continues to be an afterthought in most of geopolitical negotiations.

 The National Security Law has made Chinese authority over Hong Kong absolute. The law has eroded those aspects that made Hong Kong distinct from China — especially free media, free speech, free thinking, and criticism. However, the seeds of resistance that have been planted in the minds of the youth since 2019 will be not very easy to supplant.

 For the author, what happened in 2019 was one of the “most potent episodes of collective action [that is] only possible when people’s body, mind, heart, and soul align and point them in the same direction”. Given the current environment of protests around us, the book is a valuable read. 

 

The reviewer is associate professor,

OP Jindal Global University